How to win at socialmedia advertising.

BY GREG SCOBLETE

ocial networks, particularlyFacebook, have pulled whatmight be the greatest bait-and-switch in recent history. Theylured hundreds of millions of peopleand tens of thousands of businessesonto their platforms with one set ofalgorithms governing how posts aredisplayed. Then, without warning,those algorithms changed.

Businesses that rely on their posts beingvisible to their followers can no longer bankon those eyeballs. “There’s a limited amountof virtual land and now we’re all hooked onsocial media,” says Rich Brooks, president ofFlyte New Media. “It used to be that 80 to 90percent of your followers would see a givenpost. Now it’s between 2 and 6 percent,” Brookssays. Businesses that are relatively new face aneven tougher time simply trying to grow anaudience, much less getting their posts seen onour crowded newsfeeds, says Amy Olson, socialmedia manager at the ad agency Snap.

There’s only one sure-fire way to promote
yourself on social media today and that’s to
take out ads. That’s the bad news. The good
news is that social media ad campaigns can
be quite powerful. “We’ve seen about a ten
to one return on investment,” says Pat Hade,
founder of HS Social Media. That is, for every

“You need something tangible at the end of
this. You want a lead, a name with an email and
phone attached to it.”

START SMALL

Unlike other advertising platforms, you don’t
need a huge marketing budget to get started
on social media. You can devote as little as
$100 a week or even $5 a day to your ad
efforts. This minimum, up-front investment is
good, marketers say, since it affords you ample
room to experiment—a critical element in any
social ad campaign.

Among the marketing experts we
spoke with, three social networks popped
up repeatedly as the best places for
photographers to invest: Facebook, Instagram
and Pinterest. The last one may not get as much
photographer love as the others, but it’s a major
marketing platform for many businesses in the
wedding industry, Brooks says. Weddings rank
as one of the top three Pinterest pin categories,
and Pinterest users are more likely to spend
money on advertisers they click on than rival
social networks. Getting improved visibility
on Pinterest can also have beneficial spillover
effects like better SEO for your own website.